Tag: Linux

I recently need to setup a CentOS 6.4 vm for development Java development. I wanted to be able to run Eclipse STS and on said vm and display the X11 Windows remotely on my Windows 7 desktop via XMing. I saw no reason for the CentOS VM to have a local X11 server. I’m quite comfortable with the Linux command line. I decided to share briefly on how to go from a CentOS minimal install to something actually useful for getting work done.

/usr/bin/man The minimal install installs man pages, but not the man command. This is an odd choice. yum install man will fix that.

vim There is a bare bones install of vim included by default that is only accessible via vi. If you want a more robust version of vim, yum install vim.

X11 forwarding You need the xauth package and fonts. yum install xauth will allow X11 forwarding to work. yum groupinstall fonts will install a set of fonts.

A terminal for absolute minimal viability yum install xterm will give you a terminal. I prefer terminator, which is available through rpmforge.

RpmForge (now repoforge) Centos is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Therefore it focuses on being a good production server, not a developer environment. You will probably need rpmforge to get some of the packages you want. The directions for adding Rpmforge to your yum repositories are here.

terminator This is my terminal emulator of choice. One you added rpmforge, yum install rpmforge

gcc, glibc, etc Honestly, you can usually live without these if you stick to precompiled rpms, and you’re not using gcc for development. If you need to build a kernel module, yum install kernel-devel gcc make should get you what out need.

From here, you can install the stuff you need for your development environment for your language, framework, and scm of choice.